TO EXORCISE THE GHOSTS OF THOSE GONE LOVERS

by Lyn Lifshin

now even those
ghosts will blur
the ex-husband. I
can’t remember
his hands. Or the
one with me. The
child star, a hunk,
who put me in his
memoir with Joplin,
Bardot and James
Dean. Wrote how
we’d take off for
Paris, or Tokyo
or Berlin. My face
on his web site,
a jolt. Gone, his
letters of what I
wore when he took
the train mid July,
cut out on my birth
day. Most gone,
buried where I could
take the metro in this
town we never
both lived in and now
are buried. One’s
under the nest of
mowed grass and
flags and me under
poems so full of
what isn’t